Goodreads Giveaway: Win a Copy of A Gentleman Undone

My publisher is giving away 30 copies of A Gentleman Undone on Goodreads. Details are here. Enter by Sunday, May 27!

The giveaway is US-only, but internationals, take heart: I’m doing some interviews and guest posts this coming week and there will be some worldwide giveaways.

Guest Post: Romance at Random

I’m at the Romance at Random blog today, talking about how a person who grows up without reading romance novels can wind up writing them.

There may be some mention of Shakespeare.

A Gentleman Undone Giveaway!

Update 5/21: Susan (@Susayqthe2nd), who alerted us all to the spectacular combination of biscuits, gravy, crumbled bacon and cheddar cheese, is the giveaway winner. Everyone else, stay tuned for upcoming giveaways (some international!) on my blog tour.

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My author copies of A Gentleman Undone arrived yesterday!

To celebrate, I’m doing an early giveaway. Three copies are available on my Facebook author page, and, for those who don’t do Facebook, I’m giving away one copy to a random commenter on this post.

This is an international giveaway, both at Facebook and here. So I hope I get lots of international entries.

To enter the blog giveaway, leave a comment below, between now and midnight Pacific time on May 20. You don’t have to leave any identifying information besides what WordPress requires of you when you log in. That’ll be enough for me to get in touch with you if you prove to be one of the winners.

To make the comments interesting for me to read, please tell me your favorite thing to eat for breakfast. I like hash browns, particularly scrambled with cheese and peppers. Though most mornings I eat Fiber One cereal, the kind that looks like a bowlful of twigs.

A Good Review in the Bank, and, A Review Blog I’m Glad I Found

[By the way, I know the punctuation in this post title is messed up, but I wanted those heavy pauses where the two commas are and so there they are. That's not representative of the punctuation you find in my books. Mostly.]

I’ve had a peek at the ALA Booklist review (5/1 issue) for A Gentleman Undone, and it’s a good one, with a *star.  I’m hugely relieved by this, since I’m the sort of worrier to whom, given enough time, it begins to seem possible that 100% of reviewers and readers will hate my book.  And furthermore, that those reviewers who loved A Lady Awakened will realize in retrospect that they overrated it, and decide that they now hate that book too.

So it’s nice to already have that good review banked, as release day gets closer.  Even if every other reviewer hates it, at least I’ll know Booklist liked it :)

Anyway here’s the big-finish sentence from the review:

With her second impeccably written, exquisitely sensual historical, Grant proves she suffers from no sophomore slump as she once again shakes up the staid Regency historical world with her refreshingly unconventional, multilayered characters and richly emotional storytelling style.

1) Check it:  “exquisitely sensual.”  You all thought I only wrote bad sex, didn’t you?

2) I feel conflicted about the “shakes up the staid Regency historical world” part.  It sounds a little like “If you don’t like Regency romances, this is the book for you!”  I have to wonder how a reader who likes Regencies just fine, and doesn’t think they’re particularly staid, will take that.

On the other hand, I have to own the degree to which I do try to twist tropes and conventions; the degree to which I’m writing in response to the ubiquity of certain plots and dynamics.  There’s a part of me that’s very pleased to be thought of as “shaking things up.”

♠  ♣  ♥  ♦  ♠  ♣  ♥  ♦  ♠  ♣  ♥  ♦  ♠  ♣  ♥  ♦  ♠  ♣  ♥  ♦  ♠  ♣  ♥  ♦  ♠  ♣  ♥  ♦

In other news, Google Alerts, still letting me know of straggling Lady Awakened reviews, has alerted me to the existence of the blog Femdom Book Reviews, and not a minute too soon.

Surely I’m not the only person demoralized by the mainstream media’s recent flogging (heh) of the idea that women who read romance are uniformly looking to insert themselves into the fantasy of being dominated by an uber-alpha male, preferably a billionaire or vampire (6’5″ minimum if at all possible).

1) Not every woman has that fantasy, and

2) Not every woman reads romance looking for a rendition of what she does fantasize about.  Some of us, at least some of the time, just want to read a compelling story about people falling in love, and, if they have sex, having the sex that works for them.  And when reading that way, the dominant-male thing just plain gets a bit monotonous.

So yay for Femdom Book Reviews, and I’m really honored that they thought my book was worthy of discussion in that context.  And I’m definitely checking out some Joey Hill in 2012.

*I told this (starred review in Booklist) to daughter Seconda, and she said, “Only one star?”  Took the wind briefly out of my sails.

A Gentleman Undone excerpt up!

I’ve posted a big ol’ excerpt on my website from my upcoming book, A Gentleman Undone. Read it here:

http://www.ceciliagrant.com/a-gentleman-undone1.php

Note that this excerpt, the prologue plus the full first chapter, is longer than the excerpt printed at the back of A Lady Awakened. It includes the worst-night-of-Will’s-life prologue, and goes on to where Lydia fleeces him of 180 pounds.

There’s also another, shorter, mid-book excerpt up at Elise Rome’s March Madness blog from when I guested there on March 30. (March Madness is a fabulous series to go back and read – every day of the month she interviewed four or five different subgenre authors and bloggers!)

Also there’s a mini-excerpt, with kissing, on my Facebook page. (Note that the Gentleman Undone tab doesn’t load as quickly as I’d like, and also you have to Like the page to see the excerpt. Yes, it is a blatant ploy to get more people to like me. I’m still compensating for my middle-school years.)

With the release a little over two months away now, I’m excited and nervous. I feel like I went out on four or five different limbs with this book, which made it interesting to write, but also increases the potential for failure.

We’ll see…

So that was kind of fun, after all

I won’t lie: the Literary Lions gala was every bit as draining as I expected it to be. I was the only romance author there (there were a couple of formerly-romance-now-women’s-fiction authors, but I was the lone representative of straight-up R), and it was not a big romance-reading crowd.

However this just made it all the sweeter when people did buy my book. Which some people did, thank goodness. There were a few who bought it for a friend or relative who reads romance, and some who said, “I don’t usually read romance, but I think it’s great that you’re being included, so I’m going to buy your book.” And then there was Sarah, bless her soul, who had commented on my earlier, dreading-this-whole-event post to say she was going to be there, she loved romance, and she was buying my book.

(Seriously, that was the high point of the night for me. Meeting a romance reader in a sea of non-romance-readers felt like meeting someone from your hometown in a foreign land where nobody speaks your language.)

I met Lee Child, who just oozes charm and graciousness, and who gave a particularly resonant keynote speech. (He, too, came to writing late in life, but grew up as a voracious reader. He told a funny story about his family’s library addiction: their local branch had a limit on how many books you could have out at one time, so whenever they had a houseguest they’d make that person go get a library card; then they’d keep the card so they could check out extra books under the houseguest’s identity.)

At the signing I sat by Elizabeth George (author of the Inspector Lynley books); at the dinner I sat by Kristin Hannah, who used to write romance for Random House before switching to women’s fic. I was slightly starstruck but hopefully didn’t babble too much.

I also saw some gorgeous book covers that made me a little sad about the sameness of romance covers. I mean, obviously there are built-in limits because you want the book to be immediately identifiable as a romance, but when you see, for example, the diversity of what appears on nonfiction covers, it really sort of pounds home the nondiversity of the covers in our genre.

For instance, on the non-Elizabeth-George side of me was garden blogger/radio commentator/debut author Willi Galloway, whose book looks like this:

And down the table from me was a guy who’d written a natural history/cultural history of feathers(! I’m always impressed by the things nonfiction writers think of writing about), and his book looks like this:

Here’s what’s even cooler about this: what you’re looking at is the spine + front cover. See that fine line that cuts through the “FEATHERS” letters? That’s actually the fold between spine & front. So the front cover, alone, looks like this:

Isn’t that just so striking and awesome? You know, I was thrilled when I got the cover for A Lady Awakened, but I bet *Thor Hanson was turning cartwheels the first time he saw this.

So anyway, the dinner was good (though I made the mistake of sitting down at one of the places with the yellow dessert instead of the chocolate dessert), I got to see a lot of people in fancy clothes, and it was just an all-around honor to have been included. And I hope it will be many months before I put on heels again :)

*FYI in case you ever meet him, the first name is pronounced “Tor.”

The Day of the Literary Lions has Dawned

Woke up just before 5:00 this morning and lay awake, thinking “Why did I agree to this? Why?” I’m hoping hard that at least one other Literary Lion is roiled with similar apprehension.

In black-tie clothing news, I discovered my black top/black skirt combo wasn’t going to work (I had envisioned it looking chic and hip, but instead it looked like I didn’t understand the dress code), so I returned the top and bought a dress. It’s purple and fancy-ish (there’s a clutch of rhinestone-type things at the waist) despite being knee-length, but my eyebrow technician (oh, you’d better believe I went to the eyebrow technician), who is apparently an old hand at black-tie-optional affairs, assures me knee-length is acceptable.

Also, I needed a clutch-style purse. I found a just-okay one at Ross Dress for Less; then found a better one at the Salvation Army.

In Documenting the Event news, I discovered I can’t do Twitter on my phone. Will see whether I can do it on my e-reader; then will think about whether it’s appropriate to carry an e-reader into a black-tie-optional event.